


Feel Me Up, Babe

by willowbilly



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemon Touching, Dorks in Love, Drinking, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Pre-Season/Series 06, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-19
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-05-08 21:32:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14702772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: The first time that Jake and Amy touch each others' dæmons, it begins with Jake asking Amy if she wants to feel his booby.The booby in question is a blue-footed one, and his name is Yaakov. The name Yaakov is basically the same name as Jacob. But like. Older and traditional-y.Basically,Jake's mother and Jake's mother's dæmon had consigned them to being “Jake Jake” the way in which that poor meme wolf was “Moon Moon,” and Gina was never going to let it be forgotten.





	Feel Me Up, Babe

The first time that Jake and Amy touch each others' dæmons, it begins with Jake asking Amy if she wants to feel his booby.

The booby in question is a blue-footed one, and his name is Yaakov. The name Yaakov is basically the same name as Jacob. But like. Older and traditional-y. _Basically,_ Jake's mother and Jake's mother's dæmon had consigned them to being “Jake Jake” the way in which that poor meme wolf was “Moon Moon,” and Gina was never going to let it be forgotten.

She only ever rarely swapped out the Moon Moon reference for the Pixar's _Incredibles_ reference, maybe because Jake loved that movie too much to be as chagrined about it even when Gina called him the Incredibaby.

Jake's pretty sure, and pretty scared, that Gina is going to use her not inconsiderable evil powers of social media queendom to ensure that the Moon Moon meme would be enshrined within the collective memory of humanity for all of eternity _and beyond_ simply so that she can always introduce Jake and Yaakov to new people in the same way, with the same joke, and then laugh. Or, rather, so she can introduce them with the joke and then roll her head back, look out at them from beneath her perpetually lowered eyelashes of luxuriant indifference, and beam beatifically, while her dæmon, Wolfie, does the laughing for her.

Wolfie is a peacock. An albino peacock, which Gina has registered on all official forms of identification as a firebird from Slavic lore. Granted, Wolfie's majestic plumage does, in fact, seem to glow faintly, in the right light, or out of the corner of one's eye. He certainly _reflects_ a lot of light, anyways; he is _very_ white. And, when he so wishes, he is also _very_ loud.

Wolfie's for-show laughter is usually just a series of long-range peacock calls, kind of like wind-carried wails, and it sounds both sarcastic and mournfully haunting at the same time. Yaakov, despite also being a radical badass bird, is unable to recreate anything even remotely like it. He can only squawk, and honk, and make breathy rubber ducky sort of whistles.

But Yaakov is totally almost as dignified as Wolfie nonetheless. And he told Jake he was only kind of sad that he had never thought to try being a peacock before he'd settled as, like, the coolest canoodling seabird to ever either cool or canoodle.

Though to use that as a clunky segue, and levity aside: Jake is strictly against canoodling behind significant others' backs. It's the principle of the thing. How Not to Be a Dirtbag 101 and all that.

Jake's dad, Exhibit A, had set a great example of what _not_ to do on that front. So Jake's trying his best to be Exhibit B: Everything You _Should_ Do To Be a Fully Functional Adult in a Super Duper Healthy and Awesome Romantic Relationship.

Because he _loves_ Amy. God, he loves her so much. Sometimes when she's not even around he just thinks of her out of the blue and his stomach flutters all schoolkid-with-a-crush style and he smiles to himself like the lovesick sap he is and he keeps smiling until his cheeks hurt or until Charles pounces and half guesses and half demands to know why he's happy and it's a little embarrassing but mostly it's flat-out _amazing._

He's selfish in this way. In the normal, mushy, terrified way. Jake loves being in love, and he loves being loved, and he absolutely _does not_ want to mess this up.

And dæmon touching is a whole thing that, like, any self-respecting long-term serious relationship should totally not miss out on. A “transcendental bonding experience,” he's heard it called. “The most intimate act you can engage in with your lover besides preparing them a meal or washing their hair,” according to Charles, as Estelle nodded her agreement.

And Charles is one third of the way right. There really _isn't_ anything more intimate than essentially letting someone feel up your soul. And who better to cop a feel of Jake's soul than his soulmate Amy? The most wonderful, intelligent, topnotch person in his whole dang life? The person he trusts more than anyone in the entire world?

So naturally Jake strides confidently to their living room one Saturday morning, leans against the doorframe, pastes on a suave, winning smile, and, as Yaakov starts strutting his stuff, he asks Amy, pointblank, in his best sultry voice, “Do you wanna feel my booby?”

“Just... one... moment,” Amy says, bent over an excessively detailed diorama on the coffee table. She'd gotten involved in a school history project with Nikolaj over Charles' flustered, flattered token protestations, and was apparently not only helping Nikolaj with his, but doing one of her own, as well. Ostensibly for the purposes of inspiration, but Jake's literally betting money that Amy just wanted to go outrageously all out and show the assignment who's boss.

An adorable frown of concentration is on her face as she works on the rigging thingamajiggy bits of a sailing ship's mast, pinning the ends of several lengths of twine in place with her fingers. Constantino flies from his spot on Amy's shoulder to land on a spar whatchamacallit in a fluttering desert flash of brown and beige and begins picking at them, maneuvering in sprightly hops around Amy's hands and the ship's construction like a mini feathery sailor guy.

Tino's pretty tiny, usually mistaken for a sparrow, but he has that sturdy conical weaver's beak, the pale, polished glassy gray of it emphasized by his black chin, and he wields it with as much singleminded ruthless precision as he always does whenever he's helping Amy with one of their beloved crafts projects. With just a few deft twists and tugs at the twine he's tied off the paper sails with a succession of tight little knots and double-checked each and every one.

Amy raises her hands, slow and cautious, Tino crouching on the mast as it teeters slightly beneath him without Amy to stabilize it, and they both wait out a few suspenseful seconds to see if the knots will hold.

The knots do.

 _“Yes,”_ Amy snarls, bursting to her feet and pumping her fist in ferocious triumph. _“Suck it,_ colonialism!”

“Colonialism, huh?” asks Jake. “Is that what the boat in the bay means?”

“Yup,” Amy says. “See, the little gun ports are open to show the cannons pointed inland, and here are the invading white men with their technologically advanced weapons, pointing them at innocent families, while the captain demands food and shelter and free labor and fealty.”

“Sounds grimly accurate,” says Jake brightly.

“There's going to be a graveyard, too, for all the plague victims, and maybe a pyre to represent all 'undesirable' aspects and artifacts of indigenous culture which were put to the torch.” She gestures with no little pride as Tino preens.

Jake suppresses a gasp of delight. “Will the pyre be alight with _actual flames?”_

“No, that would be a hazard what with all of the flammable construction materials in the design.”

“Aww, dang it,” Jake moans. “You would've blown Nikolaj's _mind.”_

“You mean _your_ mind,” says Amy teasingly, still exultantly pleased with herself.

“My mind's already blown, babe,” Jake says. “You explode my whole dumb brain every day when I wake up and look into your big beautiful brown eyes.”

“This morning I woke you up with a kiss and you started gagging and chanting 'morning breath' over and over until I hit you with a pillow.”

“It's how I say 'I love you,'” says Jake.

“Speaking of what you say,” Amy says, “what _did_ you say? When you first came in and I was—” she waves at the diorama— “distracted.”

“Uh,” says Jake. “Well I mean, it's kind of silly.”

Yaakov whacks Jake's leg with his wing.

“Well, embarrassing, but otherwise serious. I'm just embarrassing myself. In advance,” says Jake, and Yaakov hits him harder and gives him a piercing yellow glare of affronted betrayal.

Before he can open his mouth and try dissembling again, hopefully in a more imaginative way this time, Tino flits up to Amy's shoulder and whispers in her ear.

A blotchy scarlet blush appears on Amy's cheeks. “You want me to _what?”_ she squeaks at Jake, who stares back at her with equal alarm and the beginnings of an equally furious blush, judging by the mortified heat coming off his own skin.

He wonders if Tino told Amy what he'd actually said, or if he'd just misheard Jake completely and had thought it was somehow something even more scandalizing than what it really was. Would that be better? That probably wouldn't be better. “Do you wanna. Y'know.” He clears his throat but still ends up croaking his words out of a suddenly very dry mouth. “Touch... my booby?”

Yaakov, panicked, strikes a courting pose, his pointy head and pointier tail and the pointy ends of his very long pointy wings all pointing pointily at the ceiling. He looks as sharp as one of those kid's toys, those old-fashioned metal knucklebone jacks which go along with a bouncy ball and which hurt like a mother when they're stepped on in the dark with bare feet while going to fetch a glass of water. All steep angles of emergency wooing.

Jake does his sexiest eyebrow waggle to top it off even though his sexy smirk has devolved into some sort of self-conscious rictus so wide that his whole face kind of hurts, though not so achingly as his dignity.

He makes the booby joke all the time, is the thing. Yaakov is a blue-footed booby and Jake is _Jake,_ of _course_ he makes that joke. He thought that maybe making it when bringing up the dæmon touching would, like, undercut the tension before it could even build, but instead he's just desperately wishing that he'd put as much planning into this as he did with their proposal. Maybe made Amy a card and bought her a bunch of roses. Candles. A gazebo and a garden to put the gazebo in.

What if Amy never wanted to touch dæmons? What if he was pressuring her? This _was_ a _big_ step. Some couples never even went through with it. Heck, a _lot_ of couples decided not to. Personal boundaries and preference and personality and all that. Rosa has said that she's never going to because that's how she rolls and what she's comfortable with, and decisions like that should be respected.

Why didn't he try to talk about this with Amy ahead of time? Or, well, that was what he was doing now, he supposes, but why didn't he broach the subject more delicately? Instead of with the booby joke?

_Why?_

_“I would love to,”_ Amy shouts at him at the top of her lungs, and then she clears her throat, her blush going even redder. “I mean,” she says, suddenly very abashed and very prim, her hands folding together in front of her, “it would be an— would be my honor. For me to touch your. Your booby.” Her hands flex and twist a bit, fretful, and she stiffly inclines her upper body down in an awkward little bow. When she bobs up again she sets her chin in determinator mode, meets his eyes, and squarely lets him _have_ it with that magnetically huge and shiny and chocolate-y gaze of hers, nothing in it but certainty and adoration as it bores into his own. “I'd love to, Jake,” she reiterates. “I love you, and I'd _love_ to.”

There's a high-pitched barely there shriek of air coming from someplace, going on and on and getting progressively louder and higher like a teapot on the boiling point, and through a haze of delirious joy Jake realizes that it's coming from him. He stifles it long enough to suck in a few deep, calming breaths, and then he flips out again.

 _“Oh my god,”_ he squeals, jumping up and down and also flapping his hands a bit. Yaakov starts hopping, as well, waving his wings and lifting up his large blue feet to show them off. “Amy! _Amy!_ I love you, too, and _I'd_ love to, too!”

Amy breaks into lovely peals of laughter and Tino takes flight to zoom around the room doing acrobatic twirls and loop-the-loops.

And then Tino lands on Jake.

“Oh,” Jake and Amy both say simultaneously, in the same hushed, awed tone, everything falling abruptly still and silent.

“That escalated quickly,” Yaakov whispers, frozen beside Amy with one of his feet still in the air. He sets it down, very slowly.

Tino has perched on Jake before. It's just that Jake was always wearing his leather jacket before, and Tino would stay around Jake's elbow where there was no risk of accidentally stepping onto skin, and Tino would warn him both before he landed and before he took off again so that they wouldn't make a mistake then, either.

Jake's just wearing a soft cotton t-shirt right now and Tino is on his shoulder and he can feel the teensy tiny pinpricks of Tino's fine little nails poking through the fabric and the exact shape of the toes they're attached to and the way that Tino's light weight shifts just barely as he balances there, poised, expectant, surprisingly solid for something so small, for something with such delicate, hollow bones.

“Hey, there,” Jake murmurs.

“Hey,” Tino says back.

Amy is already trembling, and Jake would be worried if not for her blaringly obvious excitement; she's glowing so metaphorically brightly that she's practically metaphorically incandescent. Jake might need some metaphorical sunglasses. Metaphorical _aviator_ sunglasses. Metaphorically.

“Hey, glowworm,” he says fondly to her, even though there's no way for her to follow his train of thought. He raises his eyebrows and uses them to indicate Tino and himself. One last confirmation, just to be sure. “Yeah?”

 _“Yes,”_ says Amy, emphasizing her answer with a decisive nod. “Yes, abso _lutely.”_

“Posi _tutely,”_ Jake replies enthusiastically, and he raises his arm out at shoulder-level so that Tino can walk along it towards his hand, moving slow and careful as if to keep them both from spooking.

Maybe to keep himself from spooking. His heart's racing a mile a minute in his chest, pounding loud as a kick drum. It's taking everything in him not to keel over dead where he stands.

Here lies Jake “Lightning Bolt” Santiago-Peralta. Beloved son and husband and friend and badass detective and also a modest everyday hero. Alas, he was taken too soon, for his noble heart just couldn't withstand such a high dosage of pure undiluted joy. Alav ha-shalom and so forth. The End.

The first step which Tino takes onto Jake's bare arm sends Amy into hysterical giggles.

This was not quite what Jake was expecting, and it honestly kicks off a frisson of doubtful prickles all up and down his spine and also makes Yaakov pluck at the hem of Amy's slacks in consternation, but Amy's giggling seems happy hysterical, not bad hysterical, so he just refocuses on Tino as he walks and hops his way further down Jake's arm.

Tino's wings flick as he goes, quick little clockwork blurs, and his feet feel sort of cool against Jake's skin. For some reason Jake remembers the scene in Disney's _Snow White_ where Snow is singing and making a pie crust and her little birdie buddies ruffle the edges of the dough by hopping around it to leave impressions of their feet. It always seemed kinda unhygienic, or at least he thought that Chef Charles would think so. Jake, admittedly, wouldn't care about dirty bird feet on his pie anymore than he would care that he finishes ancient half-eaten snacks which he finds in the depths of his desk, and that he's a staunch believer in what Amy insists is the bogus five second rule.

He gets a flash image of Tino's steps leaving imprints, permanent and perfect and ready to be baked into the creamy raw of him, but he blinks and it's gone. Which is probably for the best. That wasn't even kinky weird, it was just... weird.

But then, Jake's weird. And also overthinking every single second the way that Amy usually does.

He sneaks another glance at her. The giggle attack has already petered out, but her rapturous smile definitely hasn't dimmed one watt.

Tino reaches Jake's hand, his toes curling around Jake's index finger, and looks at Jake with eyes like polished black beads, round and gleaming. They study each other for a moment. Tino's feathers are usually so neat, sleeked precisely in place, but they're puffed out a bit right now as if he's feeling some static electric current, and he's quivering there on Jake's finger.

Jake can see the bluish porcelain sheen to Tino's firm finchlike beak, and the springy, almost rangy strength in his nonetheless twiggy legs, armored with rough little scales. He can see the black around his beak, the way that it reaches the corner of his eye and curves below to delineate the light buff shade of his cheek and cuts off above along the darker cap of khaki on the top of his head. He can see the beautiful, lacy pattern which decorates Tino's upper body, starting from the back of his neck, every dark mocha brown feather scalloped with a pale edge of beige. Simple and captivating the way that frost on windows is, only warm, and smoothed out.

He can see the pride, and the stubbornness, and the strength in him, condensed and distilled to fit into his diminutive form and all the more potent for it, and his kindness likewise all the greater.

There have been people who've called Amy's dæmon “drab” and “plain” and other stupid uncomplimentary things and clearly those people were all either blind or blindfolded or in a pitch dark room because Tino's _exquisite._

When Jake reaches up with his other hand and gently pets the top of Tino's head Amy _shudders_ and lets out a high, elated cry, and Tino stretches up into the ginger pressure of Jake's fingertip. He's so soft.

“Bossy,” Jake teases, and Tino ducks out from beneath him for a moment to pinch Jake with his beak in retaliation and then nudges himself back in place in a silent demand for more contact.

Jake complies. He very, very carefully folds his hand over Tino like a blanket so that only his tail and the tip of his beak stick out, the rest of him completely hidden. It's almost terrifying how small he is, how his whole body can fit just right beneath Jake's cupped hand, where Jake can keep him still and safe and revel in the sheer, quaking vibrancy of him. He feels like a miraculous paper heart pulsing against Jake's palm, origami brought to life, winged hopes and dreams and everything, everything, everything, and Jake realizes that, yup, he's crying, tears running down his cheeks.

Then Amy kneels and folds Yaakov and all of his jutting pointy awkward angles perfectly into her arms in one swift maneuver and Jake's undone. He's awash in awesome rainbow sparkle twitterpated dreamy dancing ocean-deep all-encompassing belonging, and he's going to die happy, one day, or maybe right now, and it won't matter because he has Amy there, and they're there together, and they're together, and she loves him, _she loves him so much,_ and he sort of might just for a split second pass out for a bit, and _he loves her too._

 

~~~

 

Charles calls later to invite them out for drinks with everybody and the instant that he catches sight of them his eyes narrow and then pop comically wide in realization. Estelle snaps to attention where she's sitting up on the dæmon runway along the counter and does an alarm call as if spying strangers, her prairie dog bark sounding for all the world like the yapping of a small, excited dog, her stout front legs with their long, straight burrower's claws held stiff in front of her and her black-tipped tail flicking up as she shoves her upper body airborne and flings her head back with every yip.

Charles stands hastily up from the bar, nearly trips, points at them, and yells jubilantly from across the room, “Congratulations, you lovebirds, you! I _knew_ you had it in you!”

“Thanks, Charles,” Jake says, as they join him. He boosts Yaakov up onto the dæmon runway even though he's really not small enough to be there and Estelle promptly tackles him, moving so fast that her short, sandy fur blurs; a rounded, compact, cuddly little missile which knocks Yaakov clean over in a flailing mess of wings and feet and ignominious whistles. Tino lands a circumspect distance away from the tussle and watches it wind down, chirping with amusement.

“Had what in them?” asks Terry, coming up with a couple of beers in hand and mild curiosity wrinkling his brow. Karima strides alongside him, elegant and dignified as ever despite the waddle.

Though she doesn't waddle as much as other species of geese. She's one of those, again according to Gina, “watch me whip, watch me nene” geese, the super rare, super climb-around-like-dinosaurs-over-lava-rocks ones from Hawaii. Her bill is kind of short and cute, her eyes are surprisingly big and dark and doe-y, and basically she looks generally like a Canada goose, a bit, only sort of rufflier and way prettier. Like the Disney princess of waterfowl, basically.

“You can't see it?” Charles asks Terry, bemused, but still buzzing with secondhand satisfaction. “It's written all over them! They are _flush_ with the ripe, tender bloom of The Touch!”

“The t— oh,” says Terry, the penny dropping.

“Yes indeed,” says Amy. She slings an arm around Jake and pulls him towards her, and he lets himself be pulled, swaying in with a grin and pecking a chaste if noisy smooch to her temple. Smug self-satisfaction is a _good_ look on Amy, and Jake feels as pleased as she looks.

Terry smiles at them with genuine warmth even as he shakes his head in what might be an _about time_ sort of way. “That's great, guys. I'm happy for you.”

“What are we happy about?” Rosa asks. Jake only jumps out of his skin a little bit at her abrupt appearance.

 _“The Touch,”_ Charles informs her, in a reverent whisper-shout.

She frowns at him and turns the intense force of her attention over to Terry, who obligingly fills her in. “Jake and Amy finally touched each others' dæmons.”

“Huh,” says Rosa. “Worth it?”

“Totally,” says Jake.

“Awesome,” Rosa says. She punches Jake's bicep and flashes them a brief, toothy grin.

The toothiness of Rosa's grin, while impressive when it does appear, is still nothing compared to her dæmon's. Ripper, which is only _probably_ not his real name, is a Cuban crocodile, with the jaws and the jumping power to prove it. He uses both now to scare the living bejeezus out of every dæmon on the runway and Yaakov and Tino in particular when his huge head suddenly slams down atop it, his front feet hooking over the paw-and-claw-friendly no-slip edge as he holds himself up long enough to fix them with one slitted reptilian eye of muted, speckled gray-bronze. The yellow flecks splattered on his pebbled scales are picked out beneath the bar's brighter overhead lighting, pale on the boilerplate greenish-black slate which overtakes his heavily textured upper parts. He's mostly propping himself up with the lower length of his massive tail, his hind feet barely scrabbling the floor.

Ripper's jaws part, the jagged grin which is as omnipresent as Rosa's deadpan glower cracking open, and he says, “Congrats.” Then he subsides, sliding back to the floor with a solid smack.

Tino darts to the edge of the runway and trills down after him, “Thank you!”

Ripper pretends not to have heard as he makes his sedate way back to the dæmon-reserved walkway where Yaakov is supposed to be, his tail dragging as he detours around Rosa's boots.

“C'mon,” Rosa says mainly to Terry, jerking her chin. “We're taking forever with the drinks.”

“Right,” says Terry. The beers clink as he readjusts his grip, some foam slopping over the sides, and Karima shifts her wings and nibbles at the ridges running along the top Ripper's tail as he goes past. When Ripper hisses at her Karima hisses back, both of them somehow making the exchange sound playful, and when Karima steps onto Ripper's scaly back for a free ride Ripper ignores her in favor of forward momentum and Rosa just rolls her eyes, the corner of her mouth quirking faintly upwards.

“I gotta go tell them the great news before you get there,” Charles announces. He scoops Estelle up to his chest and scoots off for the corner booth where Holt and Gina must be.

“Shall we?” Amy asks.

“Tally ho, milady,” says Jake.

By the time that everyone has relocated with the drinks and their dæmons over to the booth Charles has already conveyed the glad tidings, as evinced by Gina's slow clapping and Holt standing, straightening his jacket, and holding out his hand for them to shake.

“Is this really such a big deal, sir?” asks Amy, slightly tentative. She still clasps the captain's hand without hesitation, though, and definitely prolongs the shake for longer than he meant for it to go on, pumping his arm vigorously up and down on automatic. Those handshaking seminars really paid off.

“No,” says Holt, enduring the result of Amy's said seminars with stalwart placidity. “Not in the grand scheme of things. But I understand that celebrating the mundane yet positive facts of other people's relationships, when such private information is voluntarily shared, may create a temporary social feedback loop of elevated spirits and therefore an overall increase in quality of life and professional productivity which far outweighs the cost of indulging in the necessary niceties.” He pauses and clears his throat. Solemnly inclines his head. “And I am, on a purely personal level, delighted on your behalf. To have heard that you both underwent such an experience and found it to your liking.”

Holt's dæmon Lucius, a ridiculously huge and majestic bay and white Clydesdale just like the Budweiser horses, also inclines his head towards them, and tilts one feathered white forefoot forwards until his heavy hoof balances on its edge.

“Captain,” Amy chokes out, blinking back tears of emotion, at the same time that Jake blurts out a heartfelt, _“Dad.”_

“What?” Holt and Amy ask.

“Nothing,” says Jake, getting a grip on his trickily sentimental side and sniffing hard to banish the last of those pesky “supported son” feelings which are making his nose prickle. “Just. Thanks, sir.”

Gina cups her hands to her mouth and calls out, “Now ask Foot Fetish and Girl Scout when they're finally going to have sex for the first time.”

“We've gone over this before, Gina,” Jake calls back. “Amy and I have had sex a _healthy_ amount of times and _just_ because Yaakov's feet are _blue_ doesn't mean I'm secretly _super_ into podiatry.”

“Mmkay. That's what a virgin with a foot fetish would say, but mmkay,” Gina drawls. She sucks noisily at the ice of her depleted drink through her straw as Wolfie's laughter cuts through the establishment's atmospheric din with ear-piercingly strident clarity. “At any rate this occasion calls for shots.”

“It _is_ a happy occasion,” Charles says, already won over and patting speculatively at the pocket he keeps his wallet in as if to check how fat it is and how much he can afford to blow off. “Perhaps they have a few decent bottles of champagne somewhere in the back.”

“Oh, that's oka—” Amy starts to say.

 _“Shoooots,”_ Gina bellows.

 

~~~

 

A few hours later they're all past the boisterous part of being wasted and well into the winding down part, and Jake has that sort of swaying, blink-and-everything-ceases-to-exist-for-a-moment separation from reality which would make him worried that he wouldn't remember anything tomorrow if not for the fact that he and Gina are both documenting every single second which passes them by on their phones. Jake wants to preserve this to treasure for the rest of his life.

“Say cheese,” Jake says, or slurs, or something, and he points his camera at Amy's face.

“Gorgonzola,” she says, carefully enunciating every syllable.

“I'll allow it,” says Jake, and clicks about twelve hundred pics, all of them blurry and all of them beautiful because they're of her.

“You two are so cute I wanna puke,” says Terry. His face screws up in a queasy grimace. “Or that's the tequila. Who talked Terry into the tequila?”

“You're welcome,” Rosa says. She's conjured a pair of brass knuckles from someplace and is now polishing them lovingly, her boots hiked up onto the table in front of her. Holt is sitting up beside her, ostensibly resting his eyes, and actually snoring just a little. As Jake watches, Holt begins to keel over in slow motion until his head is resting on Rosa's shoulder, his carriage inexplicably somehow still stiff and proper.

Jake switches to video with zero shame and begins recording the captain's angelic snore for posterity. Charles, also dozing but with his head pillowed on Jake's lap, mutters in his sleep. Something about putting the ladyfingers in the tiramisu.

 _“Jake,”_ Amy says insistently, jostling his elbow and shaking the film. _“Jake.”_

“What?”

 _“There,”_ says Amy, and grabs his wrist to aim the phone over at the dæmons.

Lucius has been coaxed into bedding down on the floor, where all the others can reach him, and reach him they have. While he snores along just like Holt, his head drooping on the muscular arch of his neck until his velvety nose almost brushes the floor, Yaakov and Karima have nested themselves on his broad back and are preening each other, beaks disappearing into feathers. Ripper is tucked in tight and stock-still along Lucius' side, Estelle snoozing curled up into a little ball beneath Lucius' chin, and Tino is perched between his ears, gently preening what he can reach of Lucius' impeccably cropped mane. Even Wolfie is standing nearby as Gina dances in place next to the booth with her earphones on and her own phone in hand, the great, snowy, shimmering fan of Wolfie's train unfolded to its full glory as if in uncanny anticipation of Jake's camera.

“Perfect,” Jake says, and, switching back to picture mode, he takes approximately twelve hundred more.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Jake - Yaakov: [blue-footed ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-footed_booby) [booby](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcPHFQP9GN0)  
> Amy - Constantino, "Tino": [sociable ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociable_weaver)[weaver](http://animals.sandiegozoo.org/animals/sociable-weaver)  
> Gina - Wolfie: [peafowl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peafowl)/[firebird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebird_\(Slavic_folklore\))  
> Charles - Estelle: [black-tailed ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-tailed_prairie_dog)[prairie dog](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9o8YIEFweY)  
> Terry - Karima: [Hawaiian ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nene_\(bird\))[goose](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb1hl4i4j_0)  
> Rosa - Ripper: [Cuban ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_crocodile)[crocodile](http://www.arkive.org/cuban-crocodile/crocodylus-rhombifer/)  
> Holt - Lucius: [Clydesdale horse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clydesdale_horse)  
> 


End file.
